


Sleeping On The Job

by Carbocat



Category: Leverage
Genre: Insomnia
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-30
Updated: 2015-08-30
Packaged: 2018-04-18 01:02:29
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,613
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4686362
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Carbocat/pseuds/Carbocat
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sometimes sleep was for the weak, other times sleep was for a week, and every now and then hackers book one room for six people and hitters get no sleep at all</p>
            </blockquote>





	Sleeping On The Job

It started with a no.

Well, technically it started with the 1912 sinking of the Titanic and the realization that it was possible to make money off a tragedy if you were tacky enough.

Jameson Ashworth was just that, tacky; tacky with terrible fashion sense and thinning hair. He was tacky and the descendant of six year old William James Ashworth who made it onto a lifeboat during the sinking and into America.

People survived things and then they moved on, they lived their lives as best as survivors could. They got married, got a dog, and had kids that had kids that had kids that became hotel tycoons, and tacky, and used the traumatic experiences of those long passed to do things like open up an extremely inappropriate Titanic themed hotel that was actually shaped like the ship sinking. Ashworth also used this connection to history to connect with other people whose descendants survived which paved the way for him to con those people out of the keepsakes that had been salvaged and passed down through families from those survivors.

Basically Jameson Ashworth was an all-around tacky as hell dick and it was that which got the ball rolling on the whole ‘no’ thing.

“Uh, no.”

It was said with nonchalance, voice coated with causal indifference but tone oddly cheerful. Then a tale-tell click of a called being ended, the clack of a hard plastic phone case connecting with the glass table top, followed by a loud and deafening silence that befell the room and stifled the breath of those in it. Even he had to stop his frenzied fingers mid-type.

One does not say no to Tara Cole.

Or at least that was what Sophie had exclaimed when she not only broke the silence but shattered it like an Opera singer would a glass (or Eliot would someone’s head). And it was that which Tara had repeated loudly over the phone when she called back _and_ in the e-mail of details she had sent to him. Hardison couldn’t help but agree with the sentiment but he kept that to himself.

When Tara Cole rung you up out of the blue in the middle of the afternoon and said something along the line of ‘I’ve got a job for you so get your team and your ass to Seattle’ and then proceeded to follow that up with a ‘trust me, this is right up your alley’ one does not simply say no.

One says ‘ _hey Nate, man, turn your volume down.’_

And one says ‘when, where, and why?’ or ‘what is it?’ or ‘how valuable is it and is it potentially life-threatening?’ but one does not say _no,_ one does not even think to say such.

One does not say no and if one does they don’t say it with _nonchalance_ , they say it wearily and then immediately take it back and ask the appropriate questions.

One does not say no unless one happened to be Nate Ford.

And one does not mean it with such finality unless that one is also Nate Ford.

“I don’t need your whole team,” her voice filtered through the receiver as loud and as clear as if she was sitting right next to him. Hardison was tempted to grab Nate’s phone from him and turn the volume down but he kind of wanted to know what Tara had to say. “Just the hacker and the thief, Sophie, and another grifter. Spencer will do.”

“So everyone but Nate?” Hardison questioned, only to be glared at by the mastermind. “Just asking, gee.”

“Yes,” came Tara’s response and Nate’s glare got more intense.

“The answer is still no,” Nate replied evenly to both him and Tara. He ignored Sophie, currently staring daggers into his face from the opposite side of the table. “Now, good day.”

“Nate!” Sophie exclaimed, once he sat the phone back down on the table. He fixed her with a look and she shot one right back; and suddenly Hardison felt like a kid stuck in the middle of someone else’s arguing parents. He thought about getting up and leaving but…well, they were going to argue, and all of his stuff was here, and arguing was a hell of a lot more interesting than the episode of Project Runway playing.

“It’s a revenge con,” Nate had stated simply, sitting down heavily at the table and picking up his book. A look passed over Sophie’s face that said she was point two seconds away from throwing that book at his head. “It’s personal and those are always messy. We’re having no part in it.”

He wasn’t wrong, per se, as begrudgingly as it was to admit so when Nate was being cocky.

An old friend of Tara’s (as she described Ella McMyers, and a quick search said McMyers were to high school with someone who looked suspiciously like a young Tara Cole) who happened to also be a descendant of a Titanic survivor, loaned a bible that her great-great grandmother carried off the ship to be put on display in Ashworth’s Seattle hotel branch. Ashworth refused to give it back, claimed she signed paper giving the ownership over to him.

Papers that, as seen in the e-mail, did in fact have the signature of one Ella McMyers and matched the same signature at her bank.

“This is exactly what we do, Nate,” Sophie said. “We help people when the law can’t.”

“Personal equals trouble, Sophie,” he replied (another point well made). “It always does.”

“I don’t know, man,” Hardison spoke, wincing when both Sophie and Nate glared at him. “She did help us out with Sterling and that was pretty personal too.”

“Yes!” Sophie agreed. “She helped with Sterling!”

“We do personal a lot, actually,” Hardison added.

“And look how that turned out,” He snapped.

And yeah okay, valid points were made by Nate that did trump his ‘ _this hotel has more security than the White House and I wanna crack it’_ and Sophie’s _‘she’s my friend, Nate.’_

Tara never really did mesh into the whole ‘where the law leaves off’ shtick they did and just because Tara's reasons seem genuine she was still a really skilled grifter and could very well be playing them all for her own personal gain like Sophie had done with the First David. Point made (made in bad taste but still made).

The team _was_ in the middle of some well-deserved R &R, heavy on the R _,_ which pretty much meant that none of them were really doing all that much resting or relaxing. Eliot was probably liberating a country or busting in the faces of terrorist in Kiev or something, typical Eliot stuff. And Parker was off doing whatever it was that Parkers did while he worked on waterproofing the coms and Nate and Sophie lounged around his house on a two week long lazy day and tried out new accents. But… _BUT_ Jameson Ashworth was a grade-A dickbag and they have taken people down for less, and Ella McMyer really did need their help (she was a kindergarten teacher, for Christ sakes). Plus, if they did this to her who was to say they didn’t do it to other innocent people.

The bible was being kept in a vault under the Seattle hotel, or so Tara thought but she admitted to being unsure, and there was an annual Remembrance dinner and party held by Ashworth at the hotel for the descendants of the survivors. And it wasn’t like Parker wouldn’t like to crack a safe or two.

It wouldn’t be that hard to pull the team together.

And Sophie was glaring at Nate.

And she continued to glare at him over the rim of her coffee mug, then over the rest of the lunch of awkward silences, and then from the other side of the couch while not watching Project Runway (but wouldn’t let him turn it to the Merlin marathon on Syfy). It truly was an impressive and blood-run-cold frightening stare that rivaled Eliot’s on the Scary-O-Meter; Hardison was seventy-four percent sure that she hadn’t blinked once in the last hour and a half.

Just, _wow_ , it was so creepy and, yet, Nate didn’t seem fazed at it in the slightest.

Then Nate sighed, leveled her with a stare of his own – tired, annoyed, and didn’t even register of the Scary-O-Meter – and said no, said _we’re not doing this job, Soph. that’s final.’_

She hummed in response, crossed her arms, and stared some more.

Then she huffed and she stared, she picked up his phone from off the table and she stared. She dialed a phone number and never stopped staring at Nate.

She continued to stare through all the ‘yeses’ and the ‘uh-huhs.’ Though the ‘of course we’ll help’ and the ‘Hardison, have Eliot and Parker met us in Seattle.’

Nate stared back, through the phone call, with an unyielding and uncomfortable silence and a 'made-Hardison-really-wish-he-would-have-taken-Parker-up-on-that-bungy-jumping-from-the-top-of-the-Effle-Tower-idea-of-hers' intensity.

“You know,” he cut in when the phone call ended, drawing both their glares from each other and to him. He laughed, he regretted opening his mouth but that never stopped him from talking before. “It’s very damaging to the psyche of the children when Mama and Pop fight. Makes for an unhappy home.”

“Shut up, Hardison!”

Then Sophie raised an eyebrow at Nate as if to challenge him to turn this down once again and Nate had sighed in that very Nate kind of way, like a world was on his shoulders and that world was stupid, rolled his eyes before muttering, _‘fine.’_

“Let’s go steal us the Titanic.”

 

 

Day 1:

Ashworth’s Titanic Hotel: Room and Board was booked up but he had managed to book a room out from under a family in Seattle for a cheerleading competition. Everyone made their distaste with the fact that they had one room known…vocally and repeatedly.

“Man, there is a convention, a competition, _and_ the Titanic survivor party, you’re lucky I got us a room within a ten foot radius much less in the hotel,” he snapped sitting down on the bed, rocking. “Is this a water bed? This is a water bed. This is a waterbed in a Titanic themed hotel.”

“Well, no one said he had good taste,” Sophie shrugged, moving her way around Tara’s large suitcase. The other grifter snorted in agreement.

The room was small and definitely not built to house the four of them much less six. Two queen beds, a couch, a desk, and one very comfortable chair shoved into a room built for half of that with no floor space to move around once they got all their supplies in. The desk had been taken over with suitcases and Hardison was forced to set up shop on one of the beds.

They spent the day stuck in the stuffy overfilled room fleshing out the con (well, Tara and Sophie fleshed out, Nate made snarky comments and got acquainted with the mini bar and he played WoW with the sound turned off).

Parker showed up around noon with a new harness, three wallets she lifted in the lobby, and a diamond necklace from he-didn’t-want-to-know-where, dropped her stuff by the door and claimed the comfy chair as her own. Eliot’s flight was due to arrive within the hour and Hardison couldn’t wait because the sooner Eliot got there the sooner they could get dinner, and dinner was something he wanted.

“Call Eliot and figure out where he is,” Nate responded to him when Hardison stated that the flight had not been cancelled, Eliot had just not checked in to get on it. They ordered room service.

Despite what Eliot had growled through the receiver when Hardison finally got through to him, the hitter missing his flight had nothing to do with Hardison giving him the wrong flight details, _nun-uh, man, no way, you screwed up._ Hardison did not mix them up and he had the text to prove it (text that were still marked unread, thank you very much).

“You overslept, didn’t you?”

“Damn it Hardison, I didn’t oversleep, you screwed up the details!” he growled.

Hardison thought that the wrong flight details were not the case at all and they weren’t, he was pretty damn positive about it. As positive as he was that oversleeping wasn’t it either because, really, Eliot was pretty convincing when he said he slept only ninety minutes a day.

He though it had less to do with those and more to do with the police report about the ‘ _pretty cowboy brought into the Havenwyck ER unconscious from an eight on one fight at the karaoke bar on the corner of Eighth and Broad’_ because yeah, he saw that. That was something that he had seen with his two very pretty eyes, along with the Havenwyck hospital records he hacked into, the reports he read about the disappearing man, and the x-rays. And he was definitely planning to check them with the bruises that were no-doubt on Eliot’s temple and the broken ribs he would hide.

He was definitely going to bring all that up too, totally, as soon as the job was done and he was a state away from the hitter. And preferably, after he found pictures from the bar, maybe a video.

Hardison was pulled from his thoughts by the sound of the phone being dropped on the other line, Eliot swearing, and then the tell-tale sound of drawers being opened and forcefully slammed shut again.

“You haven’t even packed!” He exclaimed laughing. “Man, just admit you forgot! One too many hits to the head, we can’t blame you.”

“I’m going to break all of your fingers,” Eliot threatened but his voice was far away and clouded by Hardison’s own laughter causing it to lose some of its effect. Some but not all, Hardison’s laughter choked off soon after.

“You’re no fun, man.”

 “Tell me when my flight is.”

“The next flight to Seattle leaves tomorrow at six in the morning.”

“I need him here tonight,” Tara cut in, scaring Hardison half to death because _day-um_ woman, don’t sneak up behind people. “Eliot, get here tonight, in four hours. Now.”

“Unless you have a T.A.R.D.I.S. or control air traffic, the only flight out leaves tomorrow at six,” Hardison stated. “As hard as it is to believe, I don’t control everything with a computer.”

“Change the plan,” Eliot responded to her, frustration evident in his voice and in the drawer that he slammed shut. Hardison could practically hear Eliot roll his eyes at the grifter. “We’ll pick up tomorrow when I get there.”

“I can’t,” Tara replied. “We’re on a schedule. I need you here tonight.”

“It’s a grifting job,” Sophie interrupted what was sure to be Eliot’s apathetic but growly response about the whole situation. “Nate will do it. We’ll see you tomorrow Eliot, fly safe.”

“Are you going to actually make your flight or are you going to sleep through that one too?” Hardison teased.

“I didn’t oversleep! Damn it, Hard–”

Hardison hung up mid-rant, texted Eliot his new flight details and another text about old people and forgetfulness before tuning into Tara explaining what was Eliot’s role to Nate.

It was well after midnight when everyone dragged themselves back to the room.

Nate got in tight with Jameson’s mother (she had a thing for younger men with Southern accents), got her to spill a few secrets (like security flaws, and oh say, where the bible happened to be kept), Sophie and Tara worked their magic on Jameson, and Parker had found a vent hidden from the camera. He had spent the night getting into the first level of security protocols, _damn_ , did he mention more security than the White House?

Tara and Sophie claimed a bed, and actually giggled like pre-teen girls at a sleepover when Nate suggested he share the bed with Sophie and Tara moved over to Hardison’s. Parker passed out in her chair eating a bowl of cereal (that was successfully removed from her hand before it was dropped on the floor), and had punched to bruise when Hardison tried to move her.

Nate just shrugged his shoulders like it didn’t bother him before he drank enough of the minibar that the couch felt pretty damn comfortable.

Hardison had the bed to himself, which was fan-freaking-tastic.

And Eliot was off somewhere in Michigan waiting for a flight at six in the morning.

He could only dream of sleeping as well as Hardison slept.

 

 

Day 2:

Eliot protested.

“There is no way in hell I’m sharing a bed with Hardison.”

The annoyance from all their jokes about him being late seeped into his voice along with the jetlag and the frustration of learning that he wasn’t actually needed anymore since Nate took over for him the day before and settled heavy in a deep accented growl.

Tara had flat out refused to let him participate in the con the moment he walked into the room, favoring his right side and bruised from the stitches at his jaw to his swollen black eye. She had chewed him out, called him unprofessional and demanded that he not leave the room for risk of ‘ _fucking all this up, Spencer.’_ And since it was Tara’s con and she was the one in charge there was nothing he could do but shrug his uninjured shoulder, tell her he was on vacation anyways, and reevaluated his stance on knocking out his co-workers.

He had spent the entire day in the hotel room, with Hardison and Hardison’s nonstop droning about Star Rings and Lord of the Wands. The last thing he wanted to do was be near the man, much less lie beside him. The last thing he wanted to do was share a bed with anyone, it would be difficult enough already to sleep in a hotel, more so in a room with other people. It would be damn near impossible to sleep next to Alec Hardison.

“He kicks in his sleep,” he stated to the room, stopping himself before he drew attention to his bruised ribs. He was very aware that all their tired and weary eyes were on him and he was very aware of how tired he was. He was also aware of how much he didn’t care, he wasn’t doing it. It wasn’t fair.

“I do not!”

“He doesn’t,” Parker agreed with Hardison.

“I’m not – why isn’t Parker sharing a bed with Hardison?”

“Sea sick,” she replied with a yawn from the chair, wrapped up tight in a blanket so he could only see the drowsiness in her sleepy eyes.

“It’s not the sea,” he stated instead of asking how a woman who regularly and with enthusiasm threw herself off buildings gets motion sickness.

“Same thing.”

“It’s not the same thing, Parker,” He snapped. “It’s not- just let me have that chair.”

“No!” She protested, stretching out across the chair to cover every inch of it. “My chair.”

“Look man, I promise I’m not going to ruin your ninety minutes,” Hardison coaxed, patting the bed beside him. Eliot’s glare conveyed just how unconvinced he was, feeling his own exhaustion weigh heavy on him as he lost more and more ground in this argument. “Come on man, I’m tired. We’re all tired.”

Nate wouldn’t give up the couch for the other side of Hardison’s bed despite it being more comfortable and Eliot asking, then asking again, then protesting and all of his whining (it was definitely whining, growly angry man whining. One look to Parker told him that she definitely agreed, Eliot was whining). If Hardison was a betting man, and let’s face it, he was. He’d bet his favorite server that Nate was only willing to endure the uncomfortable and unforgiving springs of the hotel sofa because he was still pissed that Eliot missed his flight thus forcing Nate to help on a con he didn’t want to do in the first place.

He was also probably still ticked about the whole ‘not sleeping in Sophie’s bed.’

“I’m sleeping on the floor,” he growled with a shrug that looked more like an involuntary tick. He grabbed a pillow and an extra blanket that housekeeping brought and laid down on the floor at the bottom of the bed.

The floor was freaking hard, and marble, and slick, and unforgiving if you asked Hardison’s knee. And Eliot was hurt, even if he wouldn’t admit it, and the groan he didn’t quite stifle only proved that point.

“Dude, that is going to be really uncomfortable.”

“I can survive two weeks in an Uruguayan prison camp, I can sleep on the damn floor,” was the bitter reply he got back. “Turn off the damn light.”

A hitter sleeping on the floor wasn’t something that could easily be forgotten, especially if you listened to every nearly-silence hiss of pain from every toss and every turn until you slipped into sleep. But it was something that could slip the mind for a second or two when it was four in the morning and you were half asleep on your way to the bathroom.

And in that case, one might trip over said hitter…which might result in a quiet curse and a book being thrown at your head.

“Man, what even,” he squinted at the hitter, barely making him out in the moonlight filtering through the window. Eliot was glaring; Hardison didn’t need to see to know that.

“Damn it, Hardison you made me lose my spot,” he snapped in a growly whisper.

“Yeah, that happens when you _throw_ a book at someone,” he grumbled tossing the book back at the hitter. “And reading in the dark strains your eyes, man, you should be thanking me.”

He didn’t hear his response when he closed the door but he did feel the floor come up to meet him when Eliot tripped him on his way back.

 

 

Day 3:

Tara got hit in the nose by a wayward server’s tray (it was an accident, a totally hilarious accident that he _did_ apologize for even though it was she who told him to make a distraction and there was a _bee_ , he’s allergic). It resulted in her nose gushing blood all over her Dior dress and appetizers being crushed under her heels. James Ashmore had practically flown from the other side of the room to come to the aid of Ellie Carmichael.

Then he threatened to fire Hardison on the spot before demanding that he help Miss Carmichael back to her room and then to stay out of his sight before he followed through with that threat.

Parker lifted his keys off him in the process.

“Well, it’s not broken,” Eliot concluded pushing away from where he’d been checking her over before booping her on the nose with the smile of someone who was still a bit bitter about being told that he couldn’t even be the server that caused the distraction ( _‘there’s a dress code, Spencer, cut your hair and we’ll talk’)_. “It’ll be sore.”

“Yeah, I got that,” she hissed, glaring at Eliot and then over to Hardison. Whatever she was going to say to him was cut off by another hiss as Eliot pressed an ice pack to her nose.

With her nose stuffed up and swollen, Tara snored. And by god, did she snore. There was so much snoring and it was so loud that Hardison was sure you could hear it down the hall.

Nate was the only one to sleep through it, only Nate.

They played poker across Hardison’s bed while draggers were glared at him from the other side by Eliot. And Sophie, and Parker, but neither of them looked quite like they would strangle him with his spine as much as Eliot did.

“Man, I said I was sorry!” He exclaimed when Eliot was still staring at him. He didn’t bother to keep his voice down; if he couldn’t sleep no one should sleep. He hoped he woke someone up.

“I’m going to kill you,” Eliot declared but looked like he was too exhausted to do anything more than hold his cards and keep his stupid blank poker face up. “I’m going to kill you and then I’m going to use your corpse to smother her.”

 

 

Day 4:

He was mostly asleep, quickly falling deeper and deeper into total unawareness when the tail end of a voice, scratchy like a faraway whisper, trickled into his subconscious.

_‘Hey, Soph – hey, watch – goddamn it’_

And then a yelp, a hiss, more accented swearing from two different parts of the world, and suddenly he was up, alert, and his heart beating quick and strong against his ribcage.

“What the fuck?”

Once the lights were clicked on and everyone was up, if not slightly panicked (Parker almost tased Nate in the confusion) and concluded that the cause for alarm was not the result of an enemy out for blood but Sophie grasping at her chest in the middle of the room.

“Soph. are you alright?” Nate asked, hand still wrapped around Parker’s wrist despite the fact that her taser had been dropped and kicked away.

“Get off my hair,” a pain-laced growl sounded in the room, causing everyone’s eyes to trail down to where the hitter laid. A hand was pressed firmly against his scalp while another wrapped tightly around the Sophie’s ankle, and yikes she was practically standing on his forehead.  Eliot’s scowl was perfectly in place, the ‘I’m-thinking-of-killing-all-of-you’ one made even more deadly looking by the dark circles under his eyes and the frown on his face.

 If Hardison had not five seconds before thought that he was going to die, he might had laughed that, of all things, pulled hair was what made Eliot Spencer show pain.

Sophie looked down, then jumped away, causing another hiss to escape the hitter’s mouth. “Goodness me, I’m sorry.”

“Seriously,” Hardison complained. “Man, just move and people who stop stepping on you.”

“There’s nowhere to move to, Hardison,” Eliot growled, rubbing a hand where Sophie had pulled his hair. Eliot was tired, Hardison could see it, could hear the slight slur in his words and the waning patience. 

“Bed!” He replied, waving his arms around the empty spot next to him. “This bed, this spot right here, you can sleep right here. Please, so I can sleep. So everyone can sleep and I won’t pull your hair.”

“I’m truly sorry,” Sophie added.

“Its fine,” Eliot muttered and then sighed as if adding up the odds. He ran a hand through his hair and then down his tired face. Hardison could practically see Eliot give in before the hitter stood up slowly.

If Eliot heard the relief that went around the room he didn’t act like it.

“Shut up, Hardison,” he grumbled, falling face first into the bed next to him. “This was my choice.”

“Of course it was,” he replied, not bothering to hide the smile he shared with Sophie before she disappeared into the bathroom. He switched the lights back off before settling in himself.

“Sweet dreams, bro.”

Eliot kicked him in response.

 

 

“Sleep well?” Hardison asked after the alarm went off (the alarm that then proceeded to be turned off my Eliot reaching across the bed and throwing it at the wall; they needed a new alarm).

“I wasn’t asleep,” he replied. Judging by the puffy red-rimmed eyes that greeted him through the curtain of messy hair and the yawn that he couldn’t stifle even if he wanted, Hardison was inclined to believe him.

“Why don’t you catch some z’s and I’ll wake you up when Parker scopes out the vault,” he suggested.

“No.”

“You know, the signs of sleep deprivation are–”

“I know the damn signs, Hardison.”

 

 

Day 5:

Creating fake IDs took time. A lot of time went into creating the perfect backstories, into creating social security numbers, school records, medical history. Hell, he even made report cards. A lot of time also went into re-editing backstories when grifters went off script and made something up that didn’t fit into their made-up history.

It took a lot of time that continued long after the lights had been switched off and the team slipped into slumber. Most could block out the clicks of fingers to computer keys, most could channel it into white noise, but not Eliot.

He camped out at the bottom of the bed, with the majority of the blankets wrapped loosely around him. He took the proffered bottle of Orange Soda and the apology with a shrug and a concerning glassy-eyes concentration on the wall in front of him.

“How long have you been up?”

He shrugged, blinking hard before pulling his eyes from the wall to Hardison without really seeing anything, “Five, six days, give or take.”

 

 

Day 6:

Hardison realized four minutes into his muttered rant about computers and how you don’t eat a snow cone over one _Parker._ A rant he knew damn sure no one was actually listening to since Eliot had told him a while ago that no one was listening to it and Nate just told him to stop so that the coms stayed clear, that Eliot's breathing had evened out.

“Oh.”

 _‘What is it, Hardison?’_ Nate’s questioned loudly in his ear causing Hardison to quickly turn down the volume in Eliot’s (he wasn't dumb enough to risk trying to remove it himself).

“Eliot’s sleeping.”

‘ _Finally_ ,’ Parker added and Hardison could imagine she was rolling her eyes. _‘He was starting to get all ahh-grrr zombie.’_

Twenty-two minutes into Eliot’s impromptu nap, they learned that the man roomed next door was married…and had a mistress. And his wife and his mistress just met in a rather vocal altercation.

Eliot awoke the moment the shouting started with a start and Hardison ended up on the floor with a crack across his screen.

 

 

Day 7:

The job was a success.

Parker got the bible, Jameson got arrested, and everyone was none the wiser that Team Leverage had anything to do with it. No one had to be punched, no coms were destroyed, and no complications were ran into. It was a win-win. 

Eliot had been lying on his side beside Hardison for the last half hour as they tapped into the security feed to watch Parker in the vault, grumbling about not caring about ‘SpaceFire or whatever’

_‘Fly, Eliot, Firefly. And it is the greatest thing in the verse.’_

_‘I don’t care.’_

Hardison told them, he and Eliot would get everything from the hotel and meet them at the rendezvous spot after they took the bible to Ella.

“Eliot, man, let’s – oh.”

 

 

Eliot woke up overly warm, his cheek pressed against something soft. There were pins and needles tingling up his arms and his legs had managed to get tangled in a sheet. There was a weight heavy against the back of his head, a hand he thought, maybe.

He couldn’t remember what or who had knocked him out or fighting in the first place.

Then he peeled his eyes opened, blinked up in the dim lighting and into an overly bright smile and laughing eyes.

Not a threat.

Just an annoyance.

“And on the seventh day, Eliot rested,” the hacker laughed.

“Hardison,” he huffed, annoyed at the sleep that coated his voice. He’d fallen asleep during the con, left everyone vulnerable. It was a stupid thing to do.

“You were asleep.”

“No I wasn’t.”

“And you’re a cuddler,” Hardison cooed, a laugh slipping from his lips, and Eliot because suddenly very aware that his face was pressed into Hardison’s side and his arms thrown around the hacker’s waist. The weight on the back of his head was Hardison’s hand running through his hair. “That’s just adorable, man.”

Eliot felt the explanation build up inside him, felt words about sleeping in trees, about being stranded in the ocean and having to cling to comrades and then later to retrieved items but settled for a gruff, “shut up.”

“And, bro, you’ve been asleep for the past four hours. What was it? Ninety minutes was all Eliot Spencer needed, huh?”

“Get off me,” he snapped pushing away from the hacker with enough force to topple himself over the side of the bed if Hardison hadn’t grabbed his arms. “Stop touching me.”

“Yeah, whatever, do fall,” Hardison muttered but backed off.

“Where’s…” Eliot trailed off, waving his hand around before rubbing at his eyes, whatever their names were.

“Safe,” Hardison replied causing Eliot to visibly relax into the pillows behind him. “Everything went off without a hitch. We’re booked another hotel two blocks away. Three rooms this time.”

“Mmm,” Eliot hummed, nodding in response but Hardison wasn’t too convinced the hitter had actually listened to anything he said after ‘safe.’ “That’s great.”

“Yeah,” Hardison agreed, fighting and failing to hide his smile as Eliot struggled to keep his eyes open. “We’ve got this room for another day so if you want to go back to sleep.”

“I don’t need sleep,” Eliot muttered settling back into the pillows.

“Whatever you say,” Hardison replied.

He sent a quick text to the team, giving them an update on their flight out and his and Eliot’s plans.

“El?” He asked, peering over at him. He looked like he was out cold but it was Eliot so cautious lead the way, right? “Eliot. You up?”

No answer.

“I found video of you singing at that karaoke bar,” he whispered looking for any sign that the hitter was actually awake; Eliot didn’t so much as shift in his sleep. “You were a bit pitchy."


End file.
